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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 13 Hansard (3 December) . . Page.. 4292 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

If I have ever been tempted, and I have been tempted on a number of occasions, to vote against budget issues, this is certainly one of them - not because there is a specific person who is obviously going to be affected, but because, fundamentally, I think this type of legislation is flawed. I hope Mr Humphries will look at this issue and say, "Is it really worth, for the $330,000 we are going to raise, testing each of these areas of fundamental principle about the way we legislate and about the way the courts operate? Is it really worth proceeding down this path?".

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (11.19), in reply: Mr Speaker, I thank members for their support for the legislation, although some, obviously, were not fulsome in that support. Let me address some of the concerns that have been raised. I do not particularly enjoy having to introduce revenue-raising measures in the Assembly. Like any government, I would prefer to be able to introduce only revenue-spending measures and to be able to abolish as many revenue-raising measures as possible. I would be a very popular politician if I were able to do that all the time. But the reality is that there is a problem which we have to address.

In this case, the very real problem to which Mr Whitecross referred was the increase in the cost of administering a CIC - a criminal injuries compensation - scheme, given that in recent years there has been an explosion in applications before the courts for criminal injuries compensation and there have not been ready sources of revenue that are directly attributable to that growth in expenditure from which to offset that expenditure. The expenditure in the last financial year was something like $41/2m. This measure will raise a tiny proportion - less than 10 per cent - of that amount. I make no apologies for wanting to create some balance in the system and to emphasise, if you like, the user-pays element of this.

Criminal injuries compensation is not exactly the consequence of acts of God, movements in fiscal activity around the country or anything of that kind; it is the consequence of criminal behaviour in our community. People are able to obtain compensation for damage they have suffered because of a criminal act. It is entirely reasonable, entirely appropriate, to say that those who commit criminal acts ought to be contributing to a fund from which payments to other people, victims, are drawn. It would, of course, be even more appropriate to have individuals who were injured in an attack - an assault, for example - receive their compensation wholly from the individuals who actually attacked them. That would be a much more direct application, if you like, of the user-pays system. That is not, of course, possible.

There are, first of all, problems in obtaining damages from some people because of their financial position. There are problems in that very often people are not identified or convicted of particular offences, even though clearly criminal injury has been sustained by a particular individual. It is a matter of some regret, I have to say, that the system very rarely sheets home the cost of meeting a criminal injuries compensation payment to the individual who has given rise to it in the first place. I would like to think that we could somehow tighten that or change that lack of performance, if you like, by the system;

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